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A Santa Monica-Malibu Unified School District bond proposition ballot question was on the November 6, 2012, ballot for voters in the Santa Monica-Malibu Unified School District in Los Angeles County, where it was approved.[1]

Measure ES authorized the school district to borrow $385 million. Property owners in the district will, on average, pay $185 per year in increased property taxes in order to repay that borrowed money.

"For us, it’s critical. We have a lot of unmet facility needs and this bond will allow us to take care of those. As you know, the State of California makes us have to go this route to get our facilities taken care of. We have old buildings, we have safety concerns that we’ve been working on across the district, and we will have elementary plans that we want to finish. We have projects at Malibu High School that are unfinished. Samohi (Santa Monica High School) has a whole lot of work that it needs with those 100-year-old buildings to really get it up to speed."[3]

"We count on the state to provide a big share of our overall operating budget, which has been downsized significantly in recent years as a result of the recession and the problems that the state is having balancing its own budget. But merely all the facility funding of any scale, other than routine maintenance and very minor improvements, has always been paid for by local revenue."[3]

"There are no operating monies to pay for technology, there is no state funding for it, so there really is no other way for a public school district to modernize technology and keep abreast like private schools and schools in other states are doing in their classrooms."[3]

"Our concern from my seat is ongoing, how do we manage. We aren’t even able to do deferred maintenance kind of projects or small capital projects because we just don’t have the operational revenues that before we had deferred maintenance funds. Now because of the cuts in state budget, we’ve actually used those to offset the 22 percent deficit we have in every dollar from the state. We really are behind in terms of facilities and are going to continue to be that way."[3]

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Path to the ballot

The governing board of the school district voted 6-1 on August 1, 2012 to refer the measure to the November 6, 2012, ballot. Trustee Ralph Mechur, was the dissenting vote. He said, "I think we can do this in 2014 and we would be better prepared."[1]